Secular Homeschooling

A trip to the museum today led us into the gift shop, which led me on a seek-and-find mission which led me to borrow a pen and scribble notes all over our museum receipt about what we were finding. There are such terrific offerings available to help kids learn out there! I really get excited about stuff like this!

Today’s post will feature Knowledge Cards, many of which are sponsored by Sierra Club and produced by Pomegranate. Whether or not you subscribe to Sierra Club’s beliefs and practices, there is merit in these little decks of cards. Here’s an example – click on each deck for more information:

Forty eight cards. “No sooner have we solved one of the great mysteries posed by Earth’s oceans than another flummoxes us. We have come to understand the actions of tides, the sources of tsunamis, and—thanks to Ben Franklin—the trajectory of the Gulf Stream, but we still have much to learn about vent creatures, the Bermuda Triangle, and how global warming is changing salinity, currents, and animals’ migratory patterns. This well-researched deck of 48 cards will set you on the cutting edge of oceanographic knowledge, equipping you to quiz friends and yourself on everything from icebergs to sunken treasure.” Each deck appears to be priced at $9.95.

Some might consider this format of knowledge gathering as bits of trivia, not much more. I disagree. snippets of information can and do often lead to fascinating tangents for children, some of which can potentially develop into life-long interests. This is more than stuffing facts into your head and besides, it’s nice sometimes to ingest things in little pieces and see what becomes of the information.

Note that these cards are produced in the USA, on recycled stock, and that part of the proceeds is donated to helping preserve habitats (for the cards that are sponsored by Sierra Club.)

Knowledge cards range in subject from environmental issues to US presidents to the human body, to weather, to space travel, chemistry, geology, Ancient Egypts…………on and on. Here are a few other examples from this line by Pomegranate:

There are many, many more to pick from. Might be fun to pull these out on a long trip or at the family dinner table for starters. Or incorporate them into a unit study and see where they take you, kind of like going somewhere without a map.

Good old Amazon to the rescue – happy to report that many of these card packs are available used at greatly reduced prices!

Welcome!

If you are looking for fun, quirky and clever materials to make learning fun for kids, homeschooled or not, you've landed in a good place! Come get high on homeschooling with us. Really, it's completely harmless and you'll suffer no untoward effects - you never know what great stuff you might find!